BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is ready to concede, at least temporarily, the loss of much of Iraq to Sunni insurgents and is instead deploying the military's best-trained and -equipped troops to defend Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Tuesday.

Shiite militias responding to a call to arms by Iraq's top cleric are also focused on protecting the capital and Shiite shrines, while Kurdish fighters have grabbed a long-coveted oil-rich city outside their self-ruled territory, ostensibly to defend it from the al-Qaeda breakaway group that has seized much of Iraq.

Nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. military advisers and special operations forces are now in Baghdad and have begun to assess Iraqi forces, the Defense Department said Tuesday as the U.S. ramped up aid to the besieged country.

With Iraq's bitterly divided sects focused on self-interests, the situation is increasingly looking like the fractured state the Americans have hoped to avoid.

"We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq," top Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Irbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Two weeks after a series of disastrous battlefield setbacks in the north and west, al-Maliki is struggling to devise an effective strategy to repel the relentless advances by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a well-trained and mobile force thought to have some 10,000 fighters inside Iraq. The response by government forces so far has been far short of a counteroffensive, restricted mostly to areas where Shiites are in danger of falling prey to the Sunni extremists or around a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad.

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Militant advances have virtually erased Iraq's western border with Syria and captured territory on the frontier with Jordan.

The military's best-trained and equipped forces have been deployed to bolster Baghdad's defenses, aided by U.S. intelligence on the militants' movements, according to Iraqi officials who are close to al-Maliki's inner circle and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.

The number of troops normally deployed in Baghdad has doubled, they said, but they declined to give a figure. Significant numbers are defending the Green Zone, the sprawling area on the west bank of the Tigris River that is home to al-Maliki's office, as well as the U.S. Embassy.

"Al-Maliki is tense. He is up working until 4 a.m. every day. He angrily ordered staff at his office to stop watching TV news channels hostile to his government," one of the officials said.

The Pentagon said Tuesday that nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. advisers and special forces are now in Baghdad. An additional four teams will arrive in days, bringing the total to nearly 200.

The military's focus on Baghdad, rather than recapturing the vast Sunni areas to the west and north, has been subtly conveyed to the media in daily briefings by chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi. He has in recent days shifted from boilerplate assurances that the military is on the offensive to something less confident.

"Withdrawals from anywhere to another location does not mean defeat or that we permanently left an area," he said Monday. "It is a battlefield, and the fight includes going forward and backward and regrouping."

Al-Maliki's effort to bolster the defense of the capital coincides with Iraq's worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the nation facing a serious danger of splitting into warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves.

The declaration by Barzani of a "new Iraq," was a thinly veiled reference to newly won Kurdish control of oil-rich Kirkuk, a city the Kurds have long sought to incorporate into their self-rule region.

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